


Make as much of me as gentry

by karanguni



Category: Final Fantasy XII (OGC)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-27
Updated: 2010-06-27
Packaged: 2017-10-10 07:16:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/97088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The good doctor once spoke to his good son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make as much of me as gentry

**Author's Note:**

> 1012 words and lots of Cid posturing! \o

'You know, when your mother died, I had a thought,' said the good Doctor, tapping his fingers along the top edge of Ffamran's system; it'd broken down a few days before, one of its components fizzing away from overuse into a delicate little piece of useless chipboard and metal.

Ffamran had already got his replacement pieces - he hadn't told his father where from, but Cidolphus had raised an eyebrow. (_'That, on your allowance?'_ he had asked, to which Ffamran had retorted, _'Only you'd make rich men live like paupers.'_ Cid had laughed: _'Money's not everything, the currency you should be looking out for is ambition.'_) Good old Jules. Ffamran wasn't exactly looking forward to the thought of repayment, but first things first --

The new chipboard was light between his fingers. Ffamran eyed the system's chassis as it fell apart, neatly, in his father's hands. Beautifully; all component parts. The screws arranged to a side. The panels stacked one over the other. 'What sort of thought?' Ffamran asked, holding out the board. 'You always have _thoughts_.'

'No,' Cid said, reaching out one gloved hand. 'I always have _ideas_. Schematics, conceptualisations.' He paused long enough to curl a gentle fist about the chipboard placed onto his palm. 'Plans, Ffamran, I have plans. Not thoughts, no.' The Doctor held the circuitry up to the light, peering. 'No, no, no. My thoughts usually flow in straight lines, logical matrixes, hm.'

His mother's funeral had been painfully glorious, or gloriously painful, one of the two. As were all things in the capital: they'd made enough banging and clamouring and lauding and eulogising to cover the real noise. Ffamran's eyes still ached at the memory: his jaw clenched into the tightness of grinding teeth, and his father next to him, suddenly without condescension. The only relief was the lack of scrutiny in the face of Gramis Gana, Vayne Carudas, et al.

Tiered all those stories up in the air, there was no real way of burying anyone in Archades. They let the wind take her ashes off somewhere. Now the two of them couldn't follow her even if they tried. Such grace. She'd always been better than either of them; she knew Draklor like the back of her hand, and both he and his father had known the back of her hand once or twice. But she'd loved, and been loved. The kind of love that dare not speak its name. There was nothing that could've prepared his father for his mother: not her arrival into his life, and not her exit, either.

'So what did you think about?' Fframran asked, aloud.

Cid ducked his head down near the innards of the chassis and, prodding gently, snapped the board into place. 'We have so little control over life,' he said, his voice coming back strangely distorted. 'We have philosophy and medicine, yes, but where have they got us? A few more steps down the road. Which road? Just men playing with other men. Little games. We make our great gossamer rings in imitation of the shadow of planets.'

She'd died last week. With the bravery of a grieving youth, Ffamran snorted aloud and said, 'There you go, father. A fine summary of both Archadian democracy and natural history.' He reached stubbornly for a chassis panel, stepping up next to Cid and flattening it solidly into place. 'For the former we dress-up, and follow the rules set down by an ancient and idiotic nobility,' he said as he put the screws back in, tightened them with a bit too much force. 'And by the latter we live and die; neat, cyclical runs. Amen.'

His father laughed, or maybe it was a chuckle; his concession to the rest of humanity that Cidolphus Bunansa was _angry_, helpless, at the mercy of the tides of mortality. 'Rules and order.' He made a considering noise, watching as Ffamran stepped back and booted up the system anew. 'It smacks of a kind of provincialism, I think.'

'You're thinking again, father,' Ffamran warned absently, eyes intent on the screen. 'Be careful; it might become a habit.'

'I might get quite fond of thinking,' Cid said, rubbing his chin. The system slid into obedient set-up. 'Some say it broadens the horizons. _Rules_,' he said again, really laughing now. 'Rules! The whole world ruled by indictments written in sand?'

Irritated now by his father's fancy, Ffamran looked up. 'Yes, father - and I believe you spent more than 8 years at the Akademy learning about them. The laws of physics? Do they bear any recollection?'

Cid smiled. It reshaped his face. He placed a hand on his son's shoulder, his palms wide and warm. 'They bear some breaking, I think,' he hummed, sliding his arm full across Ffamran's back.

'Father?' Ffamran said questioningly, as the good Doctor drew them both away; out of the lab and up through the steps and down towards the docking bay which yawned over Tsenoble.

'In a few years you'll be flush full sixteen, my boy,' Cid told Ffamran. 'Then if you use what good nature gave you and twist it around your books and mechanical poetry, you'll get yourself in through Draklor. Draklor Laboratories,' he pronounced, pointing across the city. 'In royal service to House Solidor.'

Cid's arm was reassuringly heavy about his shoulders. Ffamran looked, unsure if he saw what his father saw, but seeing opportunity and an endless sky above. 'And what's there, father?' he asked, amused by the spirit back again in Cidolphus' voice. 'A few laws you'll be bending?'

'I'll leave the bending to the young Solidors all intent on each other's blood,' Cidolphus said thoughtfully. 'The Senate's for the rhetoric of good men and better villains. But a laboratory -- a laboratory's for inquiry and experiment.'

Ffamran laughed aloud there on the top of the world; Archades, there she was, and there he was, one of her motherless sons. 'Building brighter futures, father?'

'Building futures, certainly,' said Cidolphus, looking down on everything and the whole of his humanity. 'We'll see about them being _brighter_.'


End file.
